General Remove private Lobby and single Player

[Lord Rak]

Good example is the Community Goal events, if there is a CG requiring cargo hauling it is IMPOSSIBLE to do it in Open. There is at least 4-5 gangers at all time in that system just waiting for cargo ships to jump in, even with fleet carrier it is extremely hard because you must be lucky to park your carrier close enough to destination station, even then you must have a lot of luck to make it

 

[Alaska Sædelære]

We're disccussing about pixels interacting with other pixels (if that's not yet clear to you). IRL is off-topic.

No. We are discussing minds interacting with other minds. The pixels are only a tool. Our physical bodies can't be harmed this way but mental state resulting from such interactions is very much real. Some people are simply unpleasant to meet, whether irl or in virtual space. Where we have a choice to isolate ourselves from them, we may prefer that.

 

[[VR] Bulbulunufus]

Before FC and I had to sneak in to the bubble in solo with billions in data to sell before the gankers got me I just stopped at the nearest isolated stations and dropped it all there, the effect on local factions, PP or BGS was pretty much not something I was worried about. Some players sneak in, swap to a combat ship then fly around and sell it where it does their personal faction most use, but as long as there are gankers around who don't care about some lone explorer with a lot to lose who gives a monkey.

I know why I am doing it, I don't care what effect it has, and if there weren't PvP gankers running around to blow me up maybe your faction could have got the benefit. Of course none of that matters now, I just don't bother coming back to the bubble! It's like solo out here even in open!

I've never really understood this. I play at peak times and I've never been attacked anywhere that I wouldn't have expected to be. Dropping explo at BGS targets I meet no-one... Ganking is a thing and it gets excessive in some circumstances but I think it's generally overblown.

 

[Rebel Yell]

No. We are discussing minds interacting with other minds. The pixels are only a tool. Our physical bodies can't be harmed this way but mental state resulting from such interactions is very much real. Some people are simply unpleasant to meet, whether irl or in virtual space. Where we have a choice to isolate ourselves from them, we may prefer that.

Sometimes I say "o7" before using my pixels to interact with someone's else pixels (so that it should make the experience less unpleasant).

 

[varonica]

I've never really understood this. I play at peak times and I've never been attacked anywhere that I wouldn't have expected to be. Dropping explo at BGS targets I meet no-one... Ganking is a thing and it gets excessive in some circumstances but I think it's generally overblown.

A lot of it depends on your ping compared to other players, my ping is terrible compared to most players, in fact the only players I have actually met online come from the same country and even those are rare, but the risk of losing billions that took nearly 12 months of exploration to gather compared to every other profession being destroyed is the difference. It's worth taking extreme measures in extreme circumstances, for ordinary stuff in the bubble I never bother with solo or pg.

 

[Rebel Yell]

A lot of it depends on your ping compared to other players, my ping is terrible compared to most players, in fact the only players I have actually met online come from the same country and even those are rare, but the risk of losing billions that took nearly 12 months of exploration to gather compared to every other profession being destroyed is the difference. It's worth taking extreme measures in extreme circumstances, for ordinary stuff in the bubble I never bother with solo or pg.

I never understood why explo data are lost (ok they may be stored in the ship computer) but for the sake of the game... how many times datas have been lost for some kind of accident (i.e. hi-G planets, etc) vs. being shot down by another player? It looks like it's been introduced to avoid self-destruct at Beagle Point as a quick fast track for the bubble.

 

[[VR] Bulbulunufus]

A lot of it depends on your ping compared to other players, my ping is terrible compared to most players, in fact the only players I have actually met online come from the same country and even those are rare, but the risk of losing billions that took nearly 12 months of exploration to gather compared to every other profession being destroyed is the difference. It's worth taking extreme measures in extreme circumstances, for ordinary stuff in the bubble I never bother with solo or pg.

Well what you write now makes sense, and I'd take precautions even for far less data (part pf the fun of the game is adaptation to hazards). What you wrote earlier implied a ganker hiding behind every rock, which is untrue. Just to mention, I live in a peak play timezone and have good internet and good instancing, as these things go.

 

[Fenwe]

NO.

 

[Tetra Trash]

The Solo/PG could be considered as the same as they force everyone involved in BGS/PP to run the BGS/PP grinding indeed of destroying ships until one of the conflicting sides surrenders or is back into sidewinders.

I feel you; whenever I play chess I hate it when I have to actually move the pieces, instead of just shoving pawns up my opponent's nose and declaring victory!

 

[SoliDeoGloria01]

The fact that I don’t have to play in open and deal with gankers is one of the main reasons I love this game. If I wanted to play a MMO space game I would play EVE.

 

[Rebel Yell]

The fact that I don’t have to play in open and deal with gankers is one of the main reasons I love this game. If I wanted to play a MMO space game I would play EVE.

Ok.

 

[Screemonster]

I never understood why explo data are lost (ok they may be stored in the ship computer) but for the sake of the game... how many times datas have been lost for some kind of accident (i.e. hi-G planets, etc) vs. being shot down by another player? It looks like it's been introduced to avoid self-destruct at Beagle Point as a quick fast track for the bubble.

There's a lot of decisions that have been made in this game with the apparent purpose of "avoiding exploits" that end up making ganks (and death in general) way way way more punishing than they have to be.

like, if I logged on and left the station right now and met my end at the hands of some dude waiting outside to gank me, I'd lose.... what? My rebuy? Some... sub-100k in bounties I haven't bothered to cash in yet and literally don't care about? I think the worst thing is that I'd lose the exploration data for the system next door and next time I take a mission there I'll have to visit the nav beacon again to find whatever settlement I'm about to raid help out.
Worst case scenario they have a KWS and tag me for that 20k bounty I didn't bother to clear before logging off, which will send me to a detention centre. Again, that's barely an inconvenience - I'm in the bubble flying my 40ly phantom. I had to go to one the other day because I was getting my missiles engineered and forgot Liz was imperial. Hand myself in for the 10k imperial bounty, it put me 90ly away from eurybia, I was back in the time it took to make a coffee. If I was in my FDL or Mamba with their sub-20ly ranges then I'd be mildly narked but I hardly ever fly those. Largely because they have sub-20ly ranges.

Anyway, the point of all this rambling is that getting ganked on the last leg of your return trip to Jameson Memorial is a lot less punishing to your average mildly-criminal bubble-dweller than it is to a paper explorer or trader. Not only am I considerably less likely to die in a confrontation because I didn't skip hull or shield day, I'm not carrying huge amounts of cargo or exploration data, so simply put... I have a lot less to lose.

If I was in my exploration DBX it'd be a different matter, but if you see me flying my exploration DBX in open and I have any exploration data on it whatsoever then that's 100% on me. If you gank me in that thing then honestly I'd be more annoyed about the time taken to click through the rebuy screen than the actual credits lost.

 

[Rebel Yell]

There's a lot of decisions that have been made in this game with the apparent purpose of "avoiding exploits" that end up making ganks (and death in general) way way way more punishing than they have to be.

like, if I logged on and left the station right now and met my end at the hands of some dude waiting outside to gank me, I'd lose.... what? My rebuy? Some... sub-100k in bounties I haven't bothered to cash in yet and literally don't care about? I think the worst thing is that I'd lose the exploration data for the system next door and next time I take a mission there I'll have to visit the nav beacon again to find whatever settlement I'm about to raid help out.
Worst case scenario they have a KWS and tag me for that 20k bounty I didn't bother to clear before logging off, which will send me to a detention centre. Again, that's barely an inconvenience - I'm in the bubble flying my 40ly phantom. I had to go to one the other day because I was getting my missiles engineered and forgot Liz was imperial. Hand myself in for the 10k imperial bounty, it put me 90ly away from eurybia, I was back in the time it took to make a coffee. If I was in my FDL or Mamba with their sub-20ly ranges then I'd be mildly narked but I hardly ever fly those. Largely because they have sub-20ly ranges.

Anyway, the point of all this rambling is that getting ganked on the last leg of your return trip to Jameson Memorial is a lot less punishing to your average mildly-criminal bubble-dweller than it is to a paper explorer or trader. Not only am I considerably less likely to die in a confrontation because I didn't skip hull or shield day, I'm not carrying huge amounts of cargo or exploration data, so simply put... I have a lot less to lose.

If I was in my exploration DBX it'd be a different matter, but if you see me flying my exploration DBX in open and I have any exploration data on it whatsoever then that's 100% on me. If you gank me in that thing then honestly I'd be more annoyed about the time taken to click through the rebuy screen than the actual credits lost.

Clever post! Thanks for pointing also other game features which may look a bit "weird" on a first glance.

I've to say that the ways the game provide credits nowadays shouldn't really make anyone (most of players are billionaries) worried about the loss of them due to a straight rebuy (of course losing 60m for a fully A-rated Cutter is not that small, but even for that "high" amount they may be quickly recovered with 3-4hrs of bounty hunting or a bunch of wing missions).

 

[Screemonster]

Clever post! Thanks for pointing also other game features which may look a bit "weird" on a first glance.

I've to say that the ways the game provide credits nowadays shouldn't really make anyone (most of players are billionaries) worried about the loss of them due to a straight rebuy (of course losing 60m for a fully A-rated Cutter is not that small, but even for that "high" amount they may be quickly recovered with 3-4hrs of bounty hunting or a bunch of wing missions).

It's like the whole thing with hot ships and the like - it was put into the game avoid the "exploit" of just swapping into a sidewinder and getting your friends to blow you up for the bounty, and avoiding a big rebuy on your whatever-you-did-crimes-in. And then they put in the whole "hot modules" thing to avoid just stripping your ship down to the bare hull and taking the rebuy on that instead (the rebuy on a stock ship being far less than that of an A-rated one)

And like...

How much were people actually making or saving with this "exploit"?
The whole thing of getting your buddies to claim you in a sidewinder was before notoriety so murders were just a flat 5 grand a pop, so your bounties never really got that high in the first place, the bulk of your payout on being claimed was the rebuy, not any bounty you could have possibly accrued, but even then... the highest rebuy you're ever going to see is, what, 50 million on a completely tricked out cutter? Closer to 8-9 million on a medium ship?
Who cares if someone pulls some pain-in-the-backside faffing around meeting up with their friends and swapping ships to a sidewinder and getting claimed and blah blah blah blah for the sake of saving a few million credits? In the time they spent messing around with all of that nonsense, they could have made a whole lot more money without any use of trickery whatsoever. Hell, I lose more than that every week by leaving my carrier parked and not bothering to disable the services I'm not using.

What hot ships and modules do accomplish is turning a 150cr "shunted some guy on the way out of the starport" fine an absolute pain in the hole. Oh, the system you were flying to to tweak your outfitting doesn't have an IF and the faction that gave you the fine isn't present? TOO BAD, PAY UP. It's ludicrous.

 

[Rebel Yell]

It's like the whole thing with hot ships and the like - it was put into the game avoid the "exploit" of just swapping into a sidewinder and getting your friends to blow you up for the bounty, and avoiding a big rebuy on your whatever-you-did-crimes-in. And then they put in the whole "hot modules" thing to avoid just stripping your ship down to the bare hull and taking the rebuy on that instead (the rebuy on a stock ship being far less than that of an A-rated one)

And like...

How much were people actually making or saving with this "exploit"?
The whole thing of getting your buddies to claim you in a sidewinder was before notoriety so murders were just a flat 5 grand a pop, so your bounties never really got that high in the first place, the bulk of your payout on being claimed was the rebuy, not any bounty you could have possibly accrued, but even then... the highest rebuy you're ever going to see is, what, 50 million on a completely tricked out cutter? Closer to 8-9 million on a medium ship?
Who cares if someone pulls some pain-in-the-backside faffing around meeting up with their friends and swapping ships to a sidewinder and getting claimed and blah blah blah blah for the sake of saving a few million credits? In the time they spent messing around with all of that nonsense, they could have made a whole lot more money without any use of trickery whatsoever. Hell, I lose more than that every week by leaving my carrier parked and not bothering to disable the services I'm not using.

What hot ships and modules do accomplish is turning a 150cr "shunted some guy on the way out of the starport" fine an absolute pain in the hole. Oh, the system you were flying to to tweak your outfitting doesn't have an IF and the faction that gave you the fine isn't present? TOO BAD, PAY UP. It's ludicrous.

As I am too lazy to check for bounties every time I swap ship... I decided it's better to do not have clean ships anymore so anyone shooting me down can claim the bounty!

 

[mephisto9466]

As the title says: Remove private Lobby and single Player. Why? Because right now people are having influences on the galaxy and you can't stop them from having it. Best examples are Community events and Powerplay. My power was expanding into a system and I sat there for over an hour and couldn't find one player, yet the undermining bar goes higher and higher because people are hiding in single Player or private Lobby. This shouldn't be the case, if enemys are undermining a system, we should be able to fight back the undermining (maybe even add Powerplay missions?). Same goes for Community events.

The upside of this would be, that people are getting more encourage and/or forced to interact more with the community, play together and/or thinks twice before they engaging into enemy Powerplay territory or Communty events, having influence while they can't hide in private Lobby or single Player anymore. It would help to make the overall game expierence more realistic; forcing people to equip theier ships more realistic and not going on full cargo racks only. Plus games are much more fun with peoples and achieving things together. No one likes to play or fly alone all day.

The only downside of it, it would give griefers and gankers a bigger play field and newer players an even harder time to get used to the game. But as I always say to developer: The focus should not be on players, who are playing a game for two weeks, leave and never coming back. We simply should not focus on those players for obvious reasons. For griefer/gankers there should be counter measures, for example, that the FSD-Interdictor does not work in systems, where Ingenieurs are placed and/or the security forces are increased (maybe by a lot).

If you want PvP, go play CQC-Arena then!
I do. I've unlocked all achievements and my current rank is "Champion".

But I want to explore and do cargo missions!
You can do this in Open.

But I don't want to get griefed or ganked!
The chances that you find players in this big *** galaxy is super low, as long as you avoid hotspots like Community events, Powerplay systems, etc.. I play in Open for most of the time. Tip: If you find someone out there, send him a wing invite. Is he accepting it, everything is fine. If not and he flys straight to you, you should be becareful. Here is a link to some more tips: LINK. One time I randomly found someone at the Guardian site and I send him an invite. It ended up, that he joined my wing, we did the Guardians together and he gave me some tips about how to get the Guardian blueprints. Remember: Not everyone is your enemy.

You are a griefer/ganker and only want to kill weaker players!
I don't like them either and I am not one of them. I bought this game last year so I don't have the biggest or strongest ships yet. I am all for fair PvP play and realistic piracy, when there is a reason for it.

I have no friends to play with!
Use the ingame chat, ask people you randomly find, join a squadron, (on Xbox) open a multiplayer-post, just generally interact more with the community. They don't need to stay to be your friends, sometimes all it takes is just to play with some peoples together, who have the same goal as you.

Maybe there should be crossplay between different platforms (Xbox, PC, etc.) for population boost, if this isn't the case yet.

I hope this get some attention. This game is designed to be an open multiplayer game and it should treated as such one.
Feel free to add more ideas to make Open play more enjoyable for everyone.

Edit: Man, so many people are upset about getting pulled out of theier comfort zone. If these modes really exist since release (playing since 2020), maybe it's really to late to change this, I don't know. But what definitely should be changed, is the fact that people, who play in private or solo should not have influence on such things as Powerplay, Community events, etc., this should only be doable in Open. As someone mentioned, you fight most of the time against "invisible" players (not including timezones), which you all have to admit, is just simply lame and bad game design.

Edit 2: Man, so many people who are afraid of that they could meet a griefer in over 400 billion star systems, smh. How high are the chances, especially while exploring more of the empty areas of the galaxy? People act like it's the end of the world, when they die and lose cargo or exploration data.

1) I don’t play to deal with griefers and pvpers. This game is NOT a balanced game when it comes to pvp. It’s not fun getting annihilated when trying to visit an engineer. If you don’t want solo and private influencing bgs then just have them be less effective. Instead of gaining 100% of the influence, just have them gain 2% of that influence. Simple solution that is good for everyone

 

[Achtung-Goomba]

If you don’t want solo and private influencing bgs then just have them be less effective. Instead of gaining 100% of the influence, just have them gain 2% of that influence. Simple solution that is good for everyone

Emphasis mine; speak for yourself! That’s a rather punitive number you’ve plucked out of thin air, and I’d hazard a guess that if it’s such a simple solution then why are we still going around in circles? What about blocklists? What about networking jank that can, unintentionally or otherwise turn Open into de facto Solo?

Leave the BGS to run in the background, whereas I could be persuaded to support some degree of weighting or segregation of PvE and PvP activities to Powerplay is which is distinctly an opt-in feature, and one which thematically fits the theme of space-gang-war better.

 

[Robert Maynard]

If you don’t want solo and private influencing bgs then just have them be less effective. Instead of gaining 100% of the influence, just have them gain 2% of that influence. Simple solution that is good for everyone

That would result in an outcome that would deliver 98% of what those who demand that players in Solo and Private Groups lose the ability to affect the game are demanding, by penalising those who affect the galaxy we all share in Solo and Private Groups in a manner which would make player actions in Open affecting the shared galaxy have 50x the effect .

It would also be treating all players in Solo and Private Groups almost exactly the same as those who actually break Frontier's rules, i.e. those who are "shadowbanned" and cannot affect the galaxy.

Not a "solution that is good for everyone" then - as it completely disregards those who play in Solo and Private Groups - players who bought the same game on the same terms (i.e. single shared galaxy that all players experience and affect; three game modes to choose from depending on ones preference, or lack thereof for playing among other players) as those who want to take away their ability to affect the mode shared galaxy.

 

[Brrokk]

Emphasis mine; speak for yourself! That’s a rather punitive number you’ve plucked out of thin air, and I’d hazard a guess that if it’s such a simple solution then why are we still going around in circles? What about blocklists? What about networking jank that can, unintentionally or otherwise turn Open into de facto Solo?

Leave the BGS to run in the background, whereas I could be persuaded to support some degree of weighting or segregation of PvE and PvP activities to Powerplay is which is distinctly an opt-in feature, and one which thematically fits the theme of space-gang-war better.

Yup. Any actual incentive to play in Open will lead to blockageddon and destroy the instancing for everyone.

 

[Tenshi]

As the title says: Remove private Lobby and single Player. Why? Because right now people are having influences on the galaxy and you can't stop them from having it. Best examples are Community events and Powerplay. My power was expanding into a system and I sat there for over an hour and couldn't find one player, yet the undermining bar goes higher and higher because people are hiding in single Player or private Lobby. This shouldn't be the case, if enemys are undermining a system, we should be able to fight back the undermining (maybe even add Powerplay missions?). Same goes for Community events.

The upside of this would be, that people are getting more encourage and/or forced to interact more with the community, play together and/or thinks twice before they engaging into enemy Powerplay territory or Communty events, having influence while they can't hide in private Lobby or single Player anymore. It would help to make the overall game expierence more realistic; forcing people to equip theier ships more realistic and not going on full cargo racks only. Plus games are much more fun with peoples and achieving things together. No one likes to play or fly alone all day.

The only downside of it, it would give griefers and gankers a bigger play field and newer players an even harder time to get used to the game. But as I always say to developer: The focus should not be on players, who are playing a game for two weeks, leave and never coming back. We simply should not focus on those players for obvious reasons. For griefer/gankers there should be counter measures, for example, that the FSD-Interdictor does not work in systems, where Ingenieurs are placed and/or the security forces are increased (maybe by a lot).

If you want PvP, go play CQC-Arena then!
I do. I've unlocked all achievements and my current rank is "Champion".

But I want to explore and do cargo missions!
You can do this in Open.

But I don't want to get griefed or ganked!
The chances that you find players in this big *** galaxy is super low, as long as you avoid hotspots like Community events, Powerplay systems, etc.. I play in Open for most of the time. Tip: If you find someone out there, send him a wing invite. Is he accepting it, everything is fine. If not and he flys straight to you, you should be becareful. Here is a link to some more tips: LINK. One time I randomly found someone at the Guardian site and I send him an invite. It ended up, that he joined my wing, we did the Guardians together and he gave me some tips about how to get the Guardian blueprints. Remember: Not everyone is your enemy.

You are a griefer/ganker and only want to kill weaker players!
I don't like them either and I am not one of them. I bought this game last year so I don't have the biggest or strongest ships yet. I am all for fair PvP play and realistic piracy, when there is a reason for it.

I have no friends to play with!
Use the ingame chat, ask people you randomly find, join a squadron, (on Xbox) open a multiplayer-post, just generally interact more with the community. They don't need to stay to be your friends, sometimes all it takes is just to play with some peoples together, who have the same goal as you.

Maybe there should be crossplay between different platforms (Xbox, PC, etc.) for population boost, if this isn't the case yet.

I hope this get some attention. This game is designed to be an open multiplayer game and it should treated as such one.
Feel free to add more ideas to make Open play more enjoyable for everyone.

Edit: Man, so many people are upset about getting pulled out of theier comfort zone. If these modes really exist since release (playing since 2020), maybe it's really to late to change this, I don't know. But what definitely should be changed, is the fact that people, who play in private or solo should not have influence on such things as Powerplay, Community events, etc., this should only be doable in Open. As someone mentioned, you fight most of the time against "invisible" players (not including timezones), which you all have to admit, is just simply lame and bad game design.

Edit 2: Man, so many people who are afraid of that they could meet a griefer in over 400 billion star systems, smh. How high are the chances, especially while exploring more of the empty areas of the galaxy? People act like it's the end of the world, when they die and lose cargo or exploration data.